The tall, erect black man saluted, as if he knew he should not salute in civilian clothing, and then put out his hand.
"Of course, I do, Tiny," he said. "I'm just surprised they haven't put you out to pasture."
"Oh, they're trying to, Colonel," he said. "But I got the
Vice Chief of Staff on my side, and I'll stay in for a little while longer."
"Come along with us, Wes," General Black said. "You can have a little eye-opener with us."
"No, sir," Master Sergeant Wesley said. "I'll have one with you arid the colonel later. I'm going to go see Greer."
"He's not supposed to know we're here," General Black said.
"Hell, General, you know better than that. If it's going on here, Greer knows about it, and has already figured out how to make money on it."
"Indulge me, Sergeant," General Black said. "Do what I tell you."
Master Sergeant Wesley got behind the wheel of the Cadillac.
"You get in the back," he said to Colonel Parker. "It'll be like old times, me driving you someplace."
The master sergeant with the briefcase and the.45 in the shoulder holster got in beside Master Sergeant Wesley. General
Black, Colonel Parker, and the mustached civilian, Carson
Newburgh, got in the back. The Cadillac drove off.
"Call the club," General Virgil said. "Make damned sure it's open when he gets there."
"I already have, sir," his aide-dc-camp replied.
General Virgil impatiently waited for his wife to get in the staff car, and then he took off in pursuit of the Vice Chief of
Staff of the United States Army.
At ten minutes after nine the next morning, five minutes after he had watched the B-26 race down the runway, he put in a telephone call to a classmate at the United States Military
Academy, presently assigned as Deputy to the Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel.
"Howard, I just had the most interesting visitor out here."
"I heard he was going out there. What the hell was it all about?"
"Well, you ever hear of a Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker
III, retired?"
"Sure. You mean you don't know him?"
"I know he's retired out here."
"His great-great-grandfather retired out there, when Riley was an Indian-fighting cavalry post. There have been Parkers around the army for a long, long time."
"He certainly seems pretty close to General Black."
"They go back a long way together. Parker had a tank destroyer battalion with Porky Waterford's Hell's Circus in
Europe. Black had one of the combat commands. That's all it was, war stories week?"
"No. Black hinted strongly that he wanted to address
WOCRW 56-4."
"What the hell is that?"
"The sergeants we taught how to fly and made warrant officers out of."
"Is that so? Any particular reason?"
"He showed a particular interest in one of them, a kid named
Greer. Had him to dinner at the club, and then they partied all night in the VIP guest house with Black's enlisted men, that great big orderly and the guy with the gun and the briefcase.
Very intimate affair."
"Very interesting," the Assistant DCSPERS said. "I'll find out who he is."
"I thought you might be interested."
"Yeah, thanks, Evan."
"Scratch my back sometime."
The Assistant DCSPERS called for the service record of
Warrant Officer Junior Grade Edward C. Greer. He found it interesting. He was only twenty years old. They had to waive the age requirement for him to go to flight school. He had been a technical sergeant when he applied for the Warrant Officer
Candidate Program. There were not very many nineteen-year-old technical sergeants, either, which was also interesting. Nor were there very many technical sergeants of any age to whom the French government wished to award the Croix de guerre.
The State Department had declined to give permission for him to accept it, but the request was in his record jacket.
The Assistant DCSPERS saw that WOJG Greer had been assigned to a Transportation Corps helicopter company for an initial utilization tour.
He called Colonel William Roberts at Camp Rucker, Alabama, and asked him if he could use a rather unusual warrant officer right from helicopter school. Roberts said that he could not. But he suggested that the Aviation Combat Developments
Agency might be able to use him.
That name struck a familiar chord in the mind of the Assistant
DCSPERS. He had that file pulled. He saw why it had stuck in his memory. They had sent Lieutenant Colonel (
Colonel-designate) Robert F. Bellmon down there, with a delay- enroute assignment to the Bell helicopter plant, for a special senior officer's course in helicopter flight.
That was very unusual. But so was Bob Bellmon. He was
Porky Waterford's son-in-law. He'd been a POW in Germany.
The connection was complete. The Assistant DCSPERS told his secretary to cancel WOJG Greer's orders, and to have new orders cut assigning him to the Aviation Combat Developments
Office, a Class II activity of DCSOPS, at Camp Rucker, Alabama.
He was pleased; he was able to send General Black, the
Vice Chief of Staff, a personal note saying that he thought
General Black would be pleased to learn of WOJG Greer's new assignment.
General Black was pleased; one of those chair-warming asaholes in personnel had finally done something right, had recognized the boy's potential, probably because of the denied
Croix de guerre, and had gotten him a decent assignment as a consolation prize.
WOJG Greer was pleased; anything was better than an assignment to a Transportation Corps helicopter company.
And Colonel William Roberts was pleased; if there was one thing Colonel (designate) Bob Bellmon, two weeks out of helicopter school himself, didn't need, it was a chopper pilot not old enough to vote who had gone to flight school even more recently.
There were, Colonel Roberts thought, a number of interesting things he could do for Bob Beilmon in the future. Sending an incompetent newcomer to work for an incompetent newcomer was only scratching the surface of possibilities.
The first thing Barbara Bellmon said, in the lounge of the
Hotel Dothan, when her husband met her there after she had surveyed the post and the available housing was, "I now know how Grandmother Sage must have felt when she arrived at Fort
Dodge."
"Was it that bad?" Bellmon asked.
"Everything but hostile Indians," Barbara told her husband.
Grandmother Sage had been her great-grandmother, a tall, wiry, leathery lady who had lived to ninety-seven. She had regaled her grandchildren with tales of what it had been like as a young officer's wife living on cavalry posts during the Indian Wars.
Some of what she had told them had been true.
"Well, what are we going to do?" he asked. He meant, What have you decided that we're going to do? for the division of responsibilities between them gave her housing. She would arrange for it, and he would not complain.
"I thought about trailers," she said.
"Oh, Christ!" he said, earning the disapproving glare of the waitress who had approached the table for his order. "Is it that bad?" Then he turned to the waitress. "You ready for another?" he asked his wife, and when she shook her head, "no," he told the waitress, "Bring me a gin and tonic with a double shot of bitters, please."
"With what?" she asked.
"A double squirt of bitters," he explained. "I like them bitter."
"I'll ask," the waitress said. "But I don't think we have anything like that."
"Ask," he said. "And if you don't, it's OK."
"Welcome to the Wiregrass, you-all," Barbara said, softly, when the waitress was out of earshot.
"You aren't really serious about a trailer, are you?" he ask
ed.
"I don't know what I'm serious about," she said. "I'm really discouraged. There's just no housing, period."
"But a trailer?"
"Trailers," she corrected him. "Plural. We'd need two."
"You're serious, aren't you?" he asked. "You're suggesting we rent two trailers."
"We'd do better buying," she said. "They cost about $10,000, for a nice one, and we'd need two, so that would be $20,000."
"Why do we need two?"
"We have children," she said. "Or have you forgotten? And unless you would like one or more of them sharing our bed, we'll need two trailers."
"I thought they made big ones."
"I'm talking about big ones. The little ones are for newlyweds."
"No houses?"
"The name of the game is screw the soldiers," she said.
"The houses that are available are either tiny, or outrageously priced, or both."
"We need what?"
"Four bedrooms," she said.
"Dick and Billy could double up."
"Three bedrooms, if you are willing to have your children hate you."
"I'm willing," he said. "Can you find a place?"
"How about six bedrooms?" she asked. "I found an ante- bellum mansion we can have for $650 a month. Six bedrooms.
No air conditioning. I guess in the olden days they had colored people waving fans at Massa and Mistress."
"Six hundred fifty bucks a month?" he asked. "That's a hell of a lot of money."
"That's what I thought," she said, sarcastically, "but I thought
I'd better check with you."
"Where is it?"
"On Broad Street," she said, "in Ozark."
"Let me finish my bitterless gin and bitters, and we'll go look at it."
"It will be very conspicuous, Bob," Barbara said. "It looks like Tara in Gone With the Wind. And it's sort of a stock joke among the officers' ladies."
"How do you mean?"
"If I thought I could get somebody to buy the children,
I'm desperate enough to rent the $650 mansion,"' she quoted.
"Oh," he said, and thought that over for a minute. "Oh, what the hell, honey, I'm a colonel, or will be next week, and there'd probably be as much talk if we rented, or bought, two trailers."
"God, I'm glad to hear you say that," she said.
"Why?"
"Because now I can tell you I gave the man.., and the man is the mayor of Ozark, and a lawyer, and a real estate guy.., a deposit for it."
The reluctance of the Bellmons, separately, to take the an- tebellum mansion at $650 per month was not because of the rent, although $650 was nearly three times Colonel Bellmon's housing allowance. The Bellmons thought of themselves as
"comfortable." Most of their peers, if they had known the extent of their holdings in real estate and investments, would have considered them wealthy. This could be an awkward situation in the army, where most officers lived from payday to payday, and they took great pains not to rub their affluence in anyone's sensitive nostrils.
On the way to Ozark in Barbara's Buick (It. Col. Bellmon drove a Volkswagen to work), he told her about WOJG Greer.
"I was assigned a new rotary wing pilot today," he said.
"Oh?"
"By an interesting coincidence, he's the sergeant, the same sergeant, who went into Dien Bien Phu with Mac and Sandy
Felter."
"How did you arrange that?" she said.
"I didn't arrange it. Bill Roberts arranged it."
"That was nice of him," Barbara said.
"This is no favor," Bellmon said. "He stuck it in me."
"Explain," she said.
"I asked for an experienced warrant helicopter pilot, somebody who had experience in Korea, at the very least. I need experts, honey, not kids who just graduated from flight school."
"Oh," she said, understanding.
"This is the first shot at Fort Sumter," he said. "Open warfare will shortly follow."
"Why?"
"Because Roberts knows what a threat I pose to the aviation establishment," Bellmon said. "And he's a good enough soldier to know that the best defense is a good offense."
"I thought you were sort of friends," she said.
"We were, when I was a tanker, and he was trying to sell aviation to armor as a tool armor needed. But the minute I put on wings, I became a threat, a contender for control of aviation, and that he can't tolerate."
"I don't understand the rivalry."
"He's been studying revolutions," Bellmon said. "He understands that the first thing that usually happens after a successful revolution is that the leaders of the revolutionaries are stood against a wall and shot."
"That's a little strong, isn't it?" she asked.
"What any officer wants is command," he said. "What Roberts fears is that after all the work he's done to convince the brass that aviation is necessary, the commands are going to go to newcomers. Like me."
"Is he right?"
"Right now, the Aviation Board is hot stuff. They've got a bunch of money, and a bunch of people, and they're about to get a bunch of new aircraft, and everything that goes with them. They're going to get their pictures in the paper. But, and
Bill Roberts is smart enough to know it, I have the clout. I'm going to be deciding what aviation is going to do with the equipment, and the capability. He knows, in other words, that he's already been shunted over to a support role."
"How come you're so important?" she asked, gently sarcastic.
"I've had a battalion," he said. "The brass trust people who have had commands. And they don't trust aviators. They don't take them seriously."
"Is that fair?"
"What's fair? It's the way things are. The only chance the
Cincinnati Hying Club has to keep control of aviation, to keep as much as they can, is to discredit me, people like me. They'll try to make the brass believe that you can't turn over the decision-making to brand-new aviators, because we don't know what we're doing."
"Who's right?"
"That's the bitch, Barbara," he said. "We both are. I don't think the birdmen know, because they haven't been there, what the combat arms need, and what it takes to make a battalion work. And the birdmen don't think that we know, because we haven't been here, what aircraft are, and what they can do."
"So what happens?"
"Darwin. Survival of the fittest. After a good deal of internecine warfare."
"Then you'll win," she said, confidently.
"I'm not entirely sure about that," he said. "And I'm not entirely sure I should."
"Look at Mac," she said. "Trust Mac's instincts."
"What do you mean by that?"
"Mac is the legionnaire in the phalanx," she said. "Nature's natural warrior. No philosophical questions in his mind. He just wants to follow an officer who'll keep him alive and win the battles he's sent to fight. And he enlisted in your army."
"Maybe," he said.
"I remember, I was old enough, when Daddy and I. D.
White and Creighton Abrams went to armor from cavalry," she said. "Everybody said they were throwing their careers away.
That's what you're doing. They couldn't fight the last war on horses, and they probably won't be able to fight the next one with tanks, or with troops jumping in with parachutes. Army aviation is the answer, and you know it, and you know you're the guy best qualified to figure out how it should be done.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have been given the job."
"Have you ever considered a career in the WACs?" he asked.
"I prefer to stand on the sidelines, wearing a big floppy hat, and with a rose in my teeth," she said.
She showed him where to park, before Howard Dutton's office on Courthouse Square in Ozark, directly across the street from the Confederate monument. And they went into Dutton's office, where they met his daughter Melody, and had a cup of coffee. Then they walked down Broad Street where Howard
Dutton showed Colonel Bell
mon the old Fordham place, which had sat empty for five years, and which he was now going to rent to Bellmon for $650 a month.
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